I was just reading someone’s GDC wrap-up, and I was like “Why the heck did we never mention this? Our last official news post was in JANUARY!”

So everyone listen up, here’s the plan for 2013!

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No Time To Explain is OUT ON STEAM. NOW.

Get it now!

A while ago I wrote What I Learned From Dark Souls, and that was a cool, fun thing.  I wanna do another one, but the only thing I’ve played since was X-COM, and the lesson there is basically that it’s hard again. Right now I’m testing the Steam version of No Time, and getting the game in Steam-ready mode has been an unexpectedly huge bottomless pit of stress and hard work- I actually wanted to release on the 6th. So in my state of being really fuckin annoyed and tired of looking at this game: It’ll be fun to write this.

Oh did I mention we got through Greenlight and are coming to Steam?

If you’re reading a blog post on tinyBuild.com then you probably already know that. Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark this post, cos this is a good one.
I watch a lot of commentaries and talks and panels on how games get made.  They’re spread out a lot across the internet, so I figure it’ll be a good favour for everyone else if I put em all in one place. Here’s a list of a tonne o good stuff to watch (and some podcasts, some written articles etc.) if you like hearing people you’ve heard of talk passionately about things you’ve seen.

RATCHET AND CLANK 2 PLAYTHROUGH WITH DEVELOPER COMMENTARY
That’s right, the people who designed the Suck Cannon (the best weapon in anything) talk you through how one of the best games on the PS2 got made! Tony Garcia and Mike Stout were programmer and gameplay designer at Insomniac in the mid-2000′s, and since then split apart to work at Blizzard and Double Fine.

PORTAL 2 POST-MORTEM
Eric Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek, writers at Valve, talk about writing the comedy into Portal 2.

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So I’m playing DARKSIDERS here and I’m slashing through a hundred guys n pressing B when the B button’s over their heads, and I’m kinda sleepwalking through it. I got lost in a dungeon for an hour and stopped playing. It actually made me think I might be tired of videogames, but then Dark Souls came out on PC.

Dark Souls is a super interesting game. It takes a load of risks, and the designers sometimes come off as really smart, then other times come off as crazy maniacs.

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Steam Greenlight is the new service from Valve, where instead of games being approved for Steam one-by-one by a group of judicators, they are now voted on by PEOPLE LIKE YOU!

Will No Time To Explain make it to Steam? I DUNNO MAN, YOU TELL ME!

Head over to Steam right now and RATE IT UP!!!

This would be a crazy boost for us, so if you ever wanted to support tinyBuild to make something with more scope or a bigger budget or more resources: This is how to do it!

DID YOU KNOW NO TIME TO EXPLAIN IS STILL $3? It’s $3 for a while still. Going on sale was a good idea, it turns out. BUT IT WON’T BE FOREVER!
Oh hey have you heard about this new Rbots game everyone is talking about? Me n Alex have both been contributing to this game with our friends at A10 while tinyBuild isn’t releasing anything. It’s a good game, I’ve played it.

Ok so I’m designing Game 2… and I feel like I need to write this perspective down just to cement in my mind how important it is. It’s the idea that when you’re designing a game from scratch like this: Everything’s delicately balanced whether you like it or not.
What does that mean?
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NO TIME TO EXPLAIN IS $3 RIGHT NOW!

Frankly it’s surpising to us just how few videogames are on sale this summer. I’m gonna be honest, I just can’t find a single one.
So we came up with this crazy idea: What if we had some kind of summer sale?
Can we pull it off? Who knows! but thank god someone’s out there taking these crazy risks. I can only hope it catches on!

Does this include No Time To Explain, and the huge free expansion NTTE: Season 2? Of course it does, ya goof! It’s all one sealed build now! Get with the times!

Here’s that link again!

Hey remember when I said we were making that other game? I wasn’t kiddin around!

This is up to date alpha footage. The general consensus is that “it looks like ass” and some parts are hard to read and control. So I’ll be mostly in Photoshop for a while now, re-drawing stuff. What do you guys think?

This is a lot of firsts on this project; it’s my first time using C#, first 3D game, first time writing shaders, and we’re basically stepping it up from the last one. One of the goals with Game 2 was to make a way more solid style and world and attitude than No Time, which was kind of all over the place.
It’s a weird task though; should I write a 300 page design doc just for me and another guy to read? Should I write a huge backstory for every character? Well here’s one idea:
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I’m learning how to use Unity and making 3D games for the first time, and I just realised that I have this whole PhysX engine I can use now. One of the first things I did was turn the gravity all the way up and make everything faster. It took a while to figure out, and it was the first time I’ve ever had to really think about why I hate physics engines.
Then right after that I heard David Jaffe on the Giant Bombcast talking about how telekenesis never FEELS GOOD in games, so- Here’s a post about that.
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